The Road to 3.6 Beta 1

our original schedule had us hitting beta 1 today, March 13th. We’re not quite there. Beta should mean that we’re feature complete, and we’re not. We could do what we’ve done in the past, and declare a beta, while continuing to do feature work, but that just devalues the meaning of “beta”. I want people in the WordPress ecosystem to trust that when we say “beta”, that means we’re feature complete and that they should start seriously testing their themes and plugins against trunk for issues. If we continue with feature development during the beta period, that will just shove back everyone’s testing to the RC period, which will translate to more issues going unnoticed and tarnishing the release.

Consequently, I’m pushing the beta date back two weeks, to March 27th, and the release back one week to April 29th. If our beta period is actually a beta period (to work on bugs, Â not features), three weeks should be plenty of time. Ditto for the two-week RC period, for major bugs. We’ve needed longer periods in the past because we’ve been doing major feature development through the beta period and into the RC period, which, as mentioned above, I don’t want to do again.

Here is the major new-feature or new-feature-related stuff that needs to be settled and land in core (if they are going in at all) in the next two weeks (front-loaded as much as possible). Let’s redouble our efforts and get this sorted so we can get a beta out the door.

Sigh. I only have three requests for the devs: Comments, comments and comments. There’s a lack of proper developer documentation (read: the outdated Codex). But resorting to the actual source code/phpdoc is of no help either, as there’s a distinct lack of comments (particularly the additions added with 3.5 such as the new Media Library Javascript code). This is compounded by the fact there’s no rhyme or reason to some of the coding styles used – its getting uglier by the day, and I’m wondering if that has to do with missed deadlines (and thus devs feel pressured to make haste). Maybe it’s just me… But its starting to take the fun out of things.

I agree. And yes, the media stuff (as wonderful as it is in execution) is too much of a black box. Just like we have people who update our help tabs and our PHPDocs, there should be people who work on improving code commenting, formatting, and readability. Would be a good task for someone who is new to core, as their confusion about unclear sections would be genuine and not simulated, as it might be for someone who already knows what the code does.